mathTICS is a collection of mathematical comics and cartoons. It was created by Dominik Zeillinger and you can check out the comic archive at:http://www.mathtics.doze.at/texts/mathTICs-search.htmlThere is over 100 entertaining comics located there, and some are quite funny. It seems this started back in 2004ish and is still being updated 🙂

We had a math camp at University and needed something educational for the elementary school kids. We chose the topic graph theory and decided to teach them about planar graphs. It turns out thathttp://www.planarity.net has this great flash game that you can play where you have to arrange the vertices such that no edges overlap. The kids sure had fun with it. It was created by John Tantalo, a CS undergrad at Case Western Reserve University.

Another task we had on paper was for the kids to design an air flight pathway between airports, where the airports are fixed ‘vertices’, and the flight paths (‘edges’) can’t overlap to avoid crashes.

Its curvy, with a higher bit at the end and a rather aesthetically pleasing slope downwards towards a pretty fast strait bit. The actual graph itself consists of 2 strait lines meeting at the lower left hand corner of the graph and moving away at a 90 degree angle. Each line has an arrow head on the end.

I’m always eager about finding math mistakes in the news. The Herald reported that a Traffic Warden was incorrectly ticketing cars in a parking lot because of how he was using his calculator. He failed to realize that calculators work in decimals rather than minutes and hours. One car owner saw this and tried to explain the error but the Traffic Warden was convinced his calculator method was correct and continued to ticket
cars. Eventually, after an appeal the incorrect tickets were repealed and a letter of apology was sent.

Take a look at this video of Scott Flansburg on the Discovery Channel’s “More Than Human”:

In the video you see Scott Flansburg take the cubed root of 658,503 to get an answer of 87 in a matter of a second. How does he do it you ask?

This trick does require some memorization though, and also requires the
number given to be a perfect cube. You need to memorize the cubes of
the numbers 0 through 9 (or be able to figure them out on the spot).
This information is contained below:

Note
that the last digits of the cubes on the right have all the numbers 1
to 9, but no number is repeated. Here is how to find the two-digit cube
root of a perfect cube.

Take a number, such as 658,503 which is grouped into two parts.

1.
Looking at the number we see it ends in a 3, and according to the table
only 7^3 ends in a 3, thus the last digit of our number is 7.

2.
Next, ignore the last 3 digits of the cube, so consider 658. Compare
these digits with the table above. Note that 658 fits between 512 and
729. You always choose the smaller one, in this case 512 which happens
to correspond to 8^3.

Thus, the last digit is 7 and the first digit is 8, giving an answer of 87.

Normally
this trick is used for six digit perfect cubes. To help understand how
this works, ask yourself – What is the last digit of (10x+y)^3? Clearly
it is y^3 mod 10 (how does this relate to #1?).

Another Example:In 474,552 we have that 343 is the immediate smallest number from 474 so the first digit is 7.The last digit in 474,552 is 2 and only 8^3 ends in a 2, so the last digit is 8. Hence, 78^3=474,552.